We ran our first MARA league race of the season using the leaked 1.2 beta.
We had tested it with 4 or 5 racers the other night, with great success. The
collisions and touches were much better, the cars were incredibly solid
looking, and we could run side by side with confidence. There was a few
occasions of cars winking out of existence for a second or two, but
generally we were impressed.
Our league race had 12 (I think) drivers connected. We had a couple of
people that were having trouble staying connected, and I've got to say I
think the internet has gotten worse since last year. Or maybe it's just my
server connection (cable).
Generally, the race went fairly well, but we did have some interesting
problems. There was quite a bit of cars disappearing for extended periods.
This caused some collisions with invisible cars re-appearing at the same
place.
We had a number of drivers given black flags for course cuts they didn't do.
I'm wondering if it is caused by them disappearing from the server, and then
re-appearing on the other side of a corner, with a straight line between the
two positions cutting the corner. I'll try turning the cut-course off for
the next race, if I can figure out how to do that.
I also had some strange jumps in my car's position (host). Once it occurred
coming into T1 at Kyalami. One second I was approaching my braking point,
and then the car jumped well past. I didn't make the corner. Never had
anything like that happen with 1.0 or 1.1.
I realize this is only a Beta version of 1.2. I'm hoping the real one will
be a bit different. Internet racing may still be something that will work
well only in a few years, but I hate to wait!
--
Kevin Caldwell
Having been in this same race, I would agree that the 'net is getting
more bogged down, probably due to always increasing numbers of users.
My raw DOS-level ping times have been about 25% higher to the same
servers that we were using last spring. This doesn't help GPL's latency
any!
The start of the race, with 12 or more on the grid, was a problem as
usual with several warp-induced crashes when cars materialized on top
of each other. I'm not sure that it was much better than 1.0. I was
disconnected on the last lap, and again I notice that a lot of
disconnects seem to occur also at the end of a race when people are
going back to the pit screen. Anyone else noticed this?
I have my doubts about Internet racing ever being truly smooth since we
are dealing with two different time scales: the realtime speed of the
cars and their interactions at close quarters vs. the inherent time lag
in routing messages over a world-wide network. Frankly, it astounds me
that I can get a latency time of .350 seconds between Detroit and
Calgary when the "tracert" utility shows that the messages are taking
about 12-14 hops through routers in between. It's nonetheless hard to
simulate reality when your information lags behind by that much or more.
Doug G
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